Broughal Middle School offers lesson in overbuilding

School board determined to control costs at Nitschmann Middle School.

Bethlehem Area School Board, in trying to decide whether to renovate or… (HARRY FISHER, MORNING CALL…)

November 27, 2012|By Steve Esack, Of The Morning Call

Joseph Lewis was five months into his job as superintendent of the Bethlehem Area School District when he unveiled his plan to build a new Broughal Middle School.

It would be dedicated to the study of science and technology. It would be relocated to another site in south Bethlehem. It would be big enough to accommodate 1,100 students, Lewis told the South Side Task Force on Dec. 17, 2002.

Lewis' plans took longer than he wanted and generated loads of controversy as the board debated whether to relocate a new Broughal or raze the old one to make room for a new state-of-the-art structure on the same grounds.

By the time construction ended in 2010, the price tag was $56.7 million and it was big enough for 900 students.

But the curriculum Lewis envisioned never fully materialized, in part because directors did not begin to question it until construction neared an end. Students also did not opt to attend Broughal over the neighborhood middle school as Lewis had envisioned. Then the district nearly went into financial distress when its over-leveraged burgeoning debt load imploded in the economic downturn, leaving Broughal's planetarium without seats and other areas of the building underutilized by its roughly 600 students.

That not-too-distant history is driving school directors' decision-making process as they plan to spend between $16 million and $64 million to either renovate or build a new Nitschmann Middle School in west Bethlehem.

"Obviously, the capacity at Broughal is underutilized by 30 percent, and I don't see us doing the same thing from that perspective," said Director Gene McKeon, who like all nine directors was elected after Broughal construction was under way or finished. "I can't support the $64 million at all."

Director Michele Cann said Broughal was built with "too many bells and whistles." Cann said she and other board members are determined not to spend the maximum estimate of $64 million for the proposed Nitschmann project, which would start in 2015.

"It would not be prudent to build something of that size and cost in today's economy," Cann said. "While you can say a greenhouse and planetarium are fabulous things to have, and they are, I'm not sure they are essential to a middle school experience."

Cann spoke Nov. 20, a day after the school board voted 8-0, with one absence, to continue the construction timeline set by Superintendent Joseph Roy.

By sticking to Roy's timeline, the district will not invite a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historic preservation advocate, Thomas Hylton, to tour Nitschmann as south Bethlehem resident Stephen Antalics had requested.

Board President Michael Faccinetto said Hylton, who had argued in a recent Morning Call editorial for the cheapest possible renovation of Nitschmann, could present his views at a public meeting. But Faccinetto said the district would not allow Hylton a private tour of Nitschmann as he had gotten at Broughal before the building was torn down to make room for the new school and its athletic fields.

"The last time he came here, he billed the district $5,000 for his services," Faccinetto said.

On Nov. 20, Hylton, a member of the Pottstown School Board and president of the nonprofit group Save Our Land, Save Our Towns, said he never offered to tour Nitschmann. He said he did not know his name was being bantered around the district.

"All I ever did was write the piece in the op-ed," Hylton said.

Plans for a new or renovated Nitschmann have been included in the district's ongoing capital improvement plan. The improvement plan was a blueprint for how the district renovated, expanded or built new schools since the 1990s.

Nitschmann, which opened in 1922 and had an addition added in 1958, was one of the first schools improved as part of the plan when a wing was added in 1995. But the plan also called for a new school to be built eventually, when all other schools were completed.

During Lewis' tenure the district renovated and expanded Liberty High School ($60 million) and Freedom High ($30.4 million), and built two middle schools, Broughal and Northeast ($31.5 million).

Lewis began to make plans for a new Nitschmann in 2007-08. But the project was put on hold when the economy soured and the district found itself in the red, in part by the district's over-reliance on funding construction projects with risky variable rate bonds, layered with costly equally risky swap contracts, which were meant to leverage variable rate swings but ended up costing taxpayers more money.

In June, Roy announced the district's debt problems had stabilized and its fund balance had been replenished to about $16 million.